Tips, Guides & Upcoming Features

A Month After The Beta: What’s Next?

Written by:Navid1694 days ago

So we launched Breezi about one month ago today. Since then, we’ve had over 10,000 signups. Although signups don’t mean much to us. We measure our success by seeing how many awesome sites are created with Breezi. We’ve been very happy with the response. People see why we decided to do this. They appreciate the work that went into it and the fact that we took their problems seriously.

Breezi is different. It doesn’t really follow many of the conventions of other website builders. For this reason, it took us a long time to get here. To the lay the groundwork for the basics. We’re still in the phase of the basics. That’s what this post is about. We’re in “beta” because we’re still working on what we consider the basic level functionality needed to create the perfect site. The “beta” label is really ambiguous and confuses a lot of people so I want to talk a little about when we’ll consider ourselves out of beta.

So…

What are we building next?

This is my best guess on the order that we will release the features we are working on. The order will change depending on how quickly we can QA and polish them.

1) Our new edit in place editor. We’re replacing the underlying technology for the inline editor. This won’t result in any visual changes but it will make a huge difference in the markup that we produce and the stability of the editor going forward. We’ll write a follow up post on exactly what the underlying technology is, but the changes are pretty huge. This is the third time the inline editor was rewritten. There aren’t many platforms that have an inline editor as powerful as Breezi. The new version will push us even further.

2) Including 501 more fonts. Once it’s obvious, it is super obvious. You need a lot more fonts to do what you need to. We are addressing this in a few phases. The last phase being that you can use your TypeKit account along with Breezi. The first one being that we’ll include all the fonts available from the Google Fonts API.

3) Allowing you to reset your starting point and start over. This is one of the most requested features. This one will be released next week (update, it’s live now). It’ll enable you to scrap what you have now and start over.

4) The new interface for picking Apps. We haven’t met anyone that understood what we meant by “Apps” when they first got into Breezi. So we’re fixing that to remove this abstraction completely from the system. We’ll be working on just showing you the actual real app when you want to swap or install App instead of showing you a name and a letter.

5) The full out layout builder. This feature will mark a major milestone for Breezi because it reveals a lot of the underlying capabilities of the platform. The full layout builder won’t take you into another mode or some sort of weird UI where you have to guess how your page will look with this new layout… you will get all the controls right then and there. Just like you are now resizing your columns, you’ll be able to add columns, delete them, add new rows and do whatever you want right on the spot. It’s going to be amazing.

6) Bulk style editor. Think of it as a mass dot editor. The underlying idea for this feature is to make you aware that it’s important to have consistent values for certain variables of your design and that changing each value one by one can result in a chaotic design pattern which may not look so nice. The bulk style editor will allow you to change all your paddings, your margins, your button colors, block colors and much more all from one control. You’ll be able to apply the styles per row or to all the rows.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments. I will work on introducing each new feature with some mockups and a short video a few days before it is ready to be released so you can get a better idea of how it’s going to work. I’m going to leave you with an awesome screenshot of the bulk style editor. I’m going to frame it.